The way that social infrastructure is being built and paid for is changing. New healthcare facilities, prisons, and public housing have long been constructed under public-private partnerships (PPPs), but the PPP model is now stretching into the operation of the facilities.

Called “operator-led PPPs”, this approach puts the private sector in charge not just of the construction of infrastructure but of the operation of services afterwards for a defined period. For instance, in a hospital PPP the private company would provide clinical services such as x-rays as well as the building. This is also known as an outcomes-based PPP.

This approach transfers operational risks from the state body to the private partner, but the state still retains oversight of the quality of service through key performance indicators, service criteria, and performance standards. Financial penalties are put in place for failure to meet the required standards.

Solar power is experiencing a surge in popularity across the globe. It prevents carbon emissions, helps diversify the power generation mix, reduces dependence on fossil fuels, and can increase off-grid energy access.

With falling costs of solar photovoltaic (PV) technology, advancing storage technology, and grid integration, prices for solar PV electricity have been falling rapidly around the world and solar is now in many countries price competitive with traditional energy sources and has become particularly attractive for developing countries.

Australia’s involvement in the Global Infrastructure Facility (GIF)—as a founding member, and co-chair of the advisory council over the past year—underscores our commitment to lift investment in global infrastructure, which is a critical component to ensuring economic growth and poverty alleviation.

A decade before the financial crisis, Australia was a bastion of infrastructure successes. The country’s four major airports (Melbourne, Perth, Brisbane and Sydney) were privatized. Numerous greenfield projects were also launched, for example, extensive highway construction, and new projects were continually added to the pipeline.

Some of these new projects, however, faced significant difficulties: some were constructed without robust performance data, leading to overambitious forecasting and overaggressive financial structures. In part, this led Australia to suffer multiple high-profile defaults and brought the country’s infrastructure project pipeline to a halt.

In our last post, we highlighted a few examples of the innovative organizational structures that institutional investors have created to more efficiently invest in public infrastructure assets, but that is just one side of the equation. We also study programs and policies put in place by governments to more efficiently facilitate investment in the right projects and on the right terms for their constituents. That research encompasses several different topics, including enabling legislation, project risk allocation, stakeholder engagement and management, assessment frameworks for determining whether a Public-Private Partnership (P3) makes sense for a given project and others.